Law and Enjoyment

This book advocates, and develops, a critical account of the relationship between law and the largely neglected issue of enjoyment. Taking popular culture seriously as a lived and meaningful basis for a wider understanding of law, beyond the strictures of legal institutions and professional practices it takes up a range of case studies from film and literature in order to consider how law is iterated through enjoyment, and how enjoyment embodies law. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, this book addresses issues such as the forced choice to enjoy the law, the biopolitics of tyranny, the enjoyment of laws contingency, the trauma of the laws symbolic codification of pleasure, and the futuristic vision of laws transgression. In so doing, it forges an important case for acknowledging and analyzing the complex relationship between power and pleasure in law one that will be of considerable interest to legal theorists, as well as those with interests in the intersection of psychoanalytic and cultural theory.